The regrets I have are strong enough that I wouldn't share 'em. I think that you can't live without suffering some.

Nobody can compare themselves to what The Beatles went through. It was wild.

I love all kinds of stories and movies, and I did work hard to get through to the creative community and studio executives that I could work in a number of different genres and tones.

You can't expect perfection. It is important to sort of acknowledge some of our imperfections. I write them down. There's something about acknowledging mistakes and being able to put them down on paper; they become facts of your life that you must live with. And then, hopefully, you can navigate the road a little bit better.

Let me be clear: neither I nor 'Angels & Demons' are anti-Catholic.

Being a president is an impossible job - it's naive to think someone can do the job and not bend the law here and there.

I'd say that 'In the Heart of the Sea' is the most challenging movie I've made. It was tough to figure out how to lead this large cast into some very sensitive, intense, emotional scenes.

When I realized that my big dream was going to come true - 'Night Shift' was a success, 'Splash' was a success, I got the job to do 'Cocoon' - suddenly, I was underway. And I knew my name was rising up the lists. I was going to have a career. I was going to be able to direct movies until I screwed it up.

If you're not out there taking some risks, if you're just coasting along with your wins, then you're not really trying.

I really liked the 'Pitch Black' DVD, and I liked the commentary.

I can't say that I am a DVD junkie. I see most films that I want to see in the theater, and so most of my DVD-watching is catching up with the occasional movies that I missed or revisiting a film that I really care about, in which case I really want the extra channels, because it's a movie that I already love, and I want to know more about it.

I developed a theory that, in many ways, the early 'Andy Griffith' episodes especially were an awful lot like a Capra movie. They were a lot like 'Mr. Deeds' or a lot like 'It's a Wonderful Life' in tone and presentation.

I've been around a lot of artists who are also good at business, and... one minute they'll sound like an artist, and the next minute, they'll sound like the characters in 'Mad Men.' Jay-Z's a very good businessman, and he talks about it and enjoys it, but he doesn't shift.

I don't choose something unless I think I have a personal understanding and something I can offer. It's not always thematic. I wanted to do 'The Grinch' because I wanted to direct Jim Carrey creating that kind of comic fantasy character live. I just thought that would be a mind-blowing experience, and it creatively was.

A scene, a day of shooting, can often make you feel kind of stupid and inept because your one job is to anticipate and react and know what to go for.

One of the big surprises for me about Einstein was... that he wasn't this big introvert; he was more like a novelist or a painter. It's amazing how close society came to not benefiting from Albert Einstein's genius.

I've been around the 'Star Wars' universe from the beginning.

Can you imagine the first time they figured out how to mechanically raise somebody up through the stage and make them appear, or drop them down on a rope or a wire? It blew everybody's minds, I'm sure.

There was a combination of shyness and just fear of looking stupid that kept me out of a lot of interesting creative conversations that I could have had at an early age.

If I had to choose between a great acting job and a good directing job, I'd choose the directing job.

I have very close friends who are very devout Catholics, and I talked to them before the 'Da Vinci Code,' and it was very difficult for them, but I talked to them before 'Angels and Demons,' and they said the scandal, abuse of power and violence was part of church history, which you can read about in the Vatican bookstore.

I never wanted to be a brand director. I didn't want that kind of stamp. I wanted to be more like Pacino or Dustin Hoffman or Meryl Streep or De Niro - you know, a chameleon as a storyteller - because I love all kinds of movies.

I'm lucky in a lot of ways. And in my family life, my home life, is where I count myself the luckiest.

Even when you're 22 and you feel immortal, you know in your heart you're not.